1 Boring Old Man

Early Backer of War, Finally Within Grasp of Power
New York Times
By TIM ARANGO
March 19, 2010

^{“I did more than anyone else in persuading the U.S. to get rid of Saddam,” said Ahmad Chalabi, sitting in the dark next to his empty swimming pool. Soon the American troops that did so will be gone. Mr. Chalabi, as perplexing and contentious as he was in the prelude to the war, will be staying behind, perhaps finally with an official grasp on power in Iraq that has always eluded him. He was a candidate in the recent elections, his alliance of Shiite parties with ties to the radical cleric Moktada al-Sadr is running third in the balloting, and he could well claim a seat in Parliament — something he did not accomplish in the last parliamentary election, in 2005, when his party, the Iraqi National Congress, received just 30,000 votes of 12 million.}

^{His electoral prospects aside, Mr. Chalabi, at 65, has improbably — and controversially — reinserted himself in Iraqi politics. His role before the parliamentary elections in disqualifying nearly 500 candidates with ties to Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party helped raise fears about a rigged election as well as worries of disenfranchisement among Sunni Arabs, who are a minority here but were politically ascendant under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. “Baathism in Iraq equals Nazism in Germany,” he said. When he appeared recently at the government election commission, amid a ballot-counting process that was becoming more opaque by the day, he stoked conspiracy fears of political meddling among a population prone to believe them — even though political parties have a right to have representatives present, and Western diplomats have said that nothing sinister was afoot with Mr. Chalabi’s appearance.}

^{It has been six years since Mr. Chalabi was the guest of President George W. Bush at the State of the Union address. Five months after that his home was raided by the Americans, who suspected him of spying for Iran. Then the sectarian war began and tens of thousands of Iraqis died. In decades of exile in London, he made a fortune in banking and real estate, though not without the usual element of controversy; in 1992 he was convicted in absentia of bank fraud in Jordan. He did return to London during the sectarian war, but says it has been more than a year since he has been there.}

^{Mr. Chalabi was born into a prominent and wealthy Iraqi Shiite family in Baghdad, but left in 1956, years before Saddam Hussein assumed power. He returned in 2003 but quickly ran afoul of the Americans, and the animosity still simmers. In February, Gen. Ray Ordierno, the top commander in Iraq, said Mr. Chalabi and his partner on the panel that disqualified the parliamentary candidates were “clearly influenced by Iran.” Hazim al-Nuaimi, a political science professor in Baghdad, said Mr. Chalabi, “has very strange instincts for the winning hand in political poker.”}

^{“He felt the American role decreasing in the country and the Middle East and he went to play another winning set of cards, which is the Iranian cards,” Mr. Nuaimi said. Mr. Chalabi says he has had close relationships with both the United States and Iran, but admitted that relations these days with Americans are “in abeyance.” But he said he was still friends with two of his former neoconservative allies in the Bush administration, Paul D. Wolfowitz, the former deputy secretary of defense, and Richard N. Perle, who was chairman of the Defense Policy Board…}

^{“Anyone who calls him over and done is always going to be wrong,” said Aram Roston, an author who wrote a biography of Mr. Chalabi called “The Man Who Pushed America to War.” And while his allegiances seem constantly in flux, he can inspire deep loyalty. One of his closest advisers remains Francis Brooke, an American who met him in 1991 through C.I.A. connections and lives in a house in Georgetown owned by Mr. Chalabi’s political organization. “He is a Machiavellian politician who has no respect for any principle or any ideology,” said Professor Nuaimi. “Politics to him is just bargaining and deals”…}

^{The de-Baathification controversy, which caused an uproar both in the West and among Sunnis, was actually, say some Western diplomats now, a masterstroke by Mr. Chalabi. It cemented his alliance with Shiites, tapping into their still bubbling reservoir of resentment here toward the indignities of living under Mr. Hussein. “He’s a hero, Chalabi, because he uprooted the Baathists,” said Ahmed Khalaf, 33, who works in a grocery store in Sadr City, a predominantly Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad. “Any Baathists he found, he tore them out of the government.”}

^{Another Sadr City resident, Abu Ahmed Hassan, 50, called Mr. Chalabi “beloved.” He said, “The Americans hate him, the Jordanians arrested him. So he must be good”…}